Computer software is routinely used to depict graphic images on a computer display. Graphics software that is meant to run in conjunction with a `windows` based operating system must be able to make use of the graphics capabilities of the operating system, i.e. the software must understand about brushes, pens, colors etc. Special graphics processors and higher speed general purpose processors used in conjunction graphics software and large, high resolution monitors have improved the ability to display graphics and text images on a computer screen.
Graphics software packages are commercially available from a number of software vendors that run on various hardware configurations. The availability of reduced cost, more powerful processors has allowed paint and 3-D modeling systems to be made available for use on personal computers, and high speed workstations. Typical uses of the software running on this configuration of hardware is for video editing and computer animation.
Prior art computer graphics software is commercially available from SoftImage of Montreal, Canada. This software includes a paint capability wherein the user can define a brush that will be used in rendering images on the computer display. As with most computer graphics programs, existing graphics computer programs can also display text using a particular style of text where the style includes the font of the text as well as the size, color etc.
When using the prior art graphics software it was not possible to easily save all the components or attributes that combine to define brush strokes or text rendering. In order for a paint or titling artist to produce a stroke or character with a particular or specific look, he or she must set up many individual parameters. The user must define a specific brush shape, size, profile, specific color, opacity, tool shape etc. Once a parameter or tool has been changed, prior art software would not allow the user to simply retrieve the discrete settings or parameters which made up the original `style` of the previous image rendering.